Iconic graphic designer, typographer, author, and educator Stefan Sagmeister joins live on the CreativeMornings stage to talk about his multi-decade, ever-evolving career and his newest book, “Now is Better,” transforming facts about the state of our world into abstract data visualizations.
Debbie Millman:
Welcome to Creative Mornings. I’m Debbie Millman, and today I am conducting a live episode of Design Matters with one of the most acclaimed designers of our time, Stefan Sagmeister. Stefan was born in Austria, but has been based in New York since the early 1990s. Over the course of his illustrious four decade career, he has created unorthodox, provocative, multi award-winning designs for campaigns, for album covers, posters, and books that upend the status quo and have taken the design discipline in new directions. He’s won two Grammy awards. How many designers do you know who’s won two Grammy awards? And he has received the 2013 AIGA Lifetime Achievement of Medal. Solo exhibitions of his work have been mounted all over the world.
This is my fifth interview with Stefan. Seems to be endless amounts to talk about, and today we’re going to be mostly talking about his new book titled Now is Better. The book combines art, design, history, qualitative analysis, and data sets into beautiful visualizations that are part artwork, part infographic. And in doing so, Stefan presents unexpectedly optimistic statistics about improvements in life, expectancy in education and the future of humanity. We’re going to talk all about that today. Please join me in welcoming to the stage Stefan Sagmeister.
Stefan, after five interviews together, I actually discovered something about you in my research about your history that I had previously never come across.
Stefan Sagmeister:
Oh, my.
Debbie Millman:
Is it true you got your first job in design at 15 years old when you went to work at an Austrian youth magazine named Alphorn, which was named after the traditional alpine musical instrument?
Stefan Sagmeister:
That is true. But this was a tiny magazine, I started to write for them. Not very well, but then the guy who, or the person who used to do the layout for the magazine left and nobody else wanted to do it and so I tried and it turned out that I liked it much better than the writing and it was a start. Also, I think importantly because the magazine also did some cultural events like music festival or a demonstration against something and all this stuff then needed graphics, needed a poster, needed this and that, and so considering I already did the layout, I did those too, which really was important early on because let’s say we would do a music festival and I would design a poster, not very well. One of them I totally ripped off a local designer, not because I was nasty, because I knew so little that I didn’t know that you couldn’t rip off another designer.
Debbie Millman:
Well, imitation is sort of the sincerest form of flattery, right?
Stefan Sagmeister:
But it was great because when you did the poster and we, of course, put the posters up ourselves with wheat paste and then 500 people would show up to that concert and the only information that they had about it was that poster so you really saw the effect of the work that you did, which was fantastic, and I think a super great learning experience for later on that the stuff that you do really matters.
Debbie Millman:
One of my favorite tidbits I found about this experience at 15 was you originally found out about the magazine from a sticker on a friend’s bicycle, and you subsequently joined him and the rest of the magazine staff for an editorial meeting in the boys basement.
Stefan Sagmeister:
Yes.
Debbie Millman:
So very official.
Stefan Sagmeister:
Yes. Oh, totally.
Debbie Millman:
And I believe it was at this early stage of your career that you discovered your proclivity for using your own handwriting, mostly because most of the headlines you were writing at the time, or designing, you were using Letraset, but it was used Letraset that had been donated and all the E’s would be missing.
Stefan Sagmeister:
It just turned out that it was easier to write the whole headline by hand then to painfully carefully reconstruct all the E’s of whatever. I think Cooper Black was a favorite typeface at the time. Does anybody know what Letraset is?
Debbie Millman:
So that’s my next question because I was thinking about this.
Stefan Sagmeister:
How about Cooper Black? Oh, yeah.
Debbie Millman:
So for those young ones in the audience that might not know, tell them about Letraset.
Stefan Sagmeister:
Well, Letraset used to be a extremely important company on the, this was a brand on as well known among graphic designers as Adobe.
Debbie Millman:
Absolutely.
Stefan Sagmeister:
The Letraset catalog meaning was the holy grail, was the Bible. And basically, it was sheets of rubdown letters that you did headlines with. You couldn’t… It was too time-consuming to do body copy, but headlines were ultimately body copy you had to send out to be type set. But headlines, you did yourself with Letraset and they were quite expensive so we, as a magazine, we were so small we couldn’t afford it. That’s why we had donated Letraset sheets from small advertising agencies from the area. But if you could afford it, they had their own custom cabinets with the various typefaces ordered by alphabetically, and there always was a sheath in between. There was a certain smell to it, meaning I’m not nostalgic about them.
Debbie Millman:
No, not at all.
Stefan Sagmeister:
They were a pain in the ass. But when they were old, they crackled or the…
Debbie Millman:
Well, when you burnished the letter down, it would have a bump in the plastic sheet. I found one of those files on eBay and I have it. It’s this yellow boxy file and you open it up and there are all the sheets with the blue paper in between. So I have a lot, if you want. The E’s are there if you want to use them.
Stefan Sagmeister:
No.
Debbie Millman:
You grew up in Austria. Your parents had a big store in a small town, and you described it as the place where you could buy work clothes if you wanted quality work clothes, but also your Sunday suit for church. Did you also work in the store?
Stefan Sagmeister:
I did not. Well, we helped out for, let’s say now, before Christmas on Saturdays, the whole family was in the store, everybody, because everybody had to help out because Saturdays before the holidays were the busiest time of the year. But my parents were full time, full-blooded salespeople. Not so much my dad, my dad was doing in the back, but my mom loved it. My mom’s dream was to have a store was a good reason why she married dad because he had a store and she was…
Debbie Millman:
Ah, love.
Stefan Sagmeister:
She would be the first to say so. I had a discussion with her once where I told her, “You know that among scientists, or artists, or educators, they don’t think having a store is the best thing.” She said, “What do you mean?” And I said, “Well, like, you know…” my sister is an educator, and I asked her, come over like, “Among educators, teachers, they think teaching is the most valuable thing.” And my sister agreed and my mom thought about it for a second and she said, “Yeah, but having a store is best.”
Debbie Millman:
I love the idea of thinking that what you do is the best. So many people I know want to be somebody else or want to do something else or have this vision of what they will be in the future. How remarkable that both your mother and your sister are utterly content with what they are and what they do and who they are in the world.
Stefan Sagmeister:
I think my dad was not quite there. I think my dad took over the store from his parents who took over the store from their parents, and there were at least two generations, my granddad, who actually was educated as a sign painter, meaning a graphic designer. At that time graphic design didn’t exist and he was not allowed to really practice sign painting because he had to take over the store. And my dad-
Debbie Millman:
Couldn’t he do sign painting for the store?
Stefan Sagmeister:
Well, you know what, if he did, then those signs didn’t survive. But I have a big sign of his hanging in my apartment here on 14th Street, and he was very conservative at that time, but sign painting also meant you had to carve the wood with the ornaments. I mean, this was real craft. This was not something trivial.
Debbie Millman:
This wasn’t electricity.
Stefan Sagmeister:
So I think that my dad allowed everybody to do what they wanted from his own experience. And so my sisters went into education, two of them. Two of my brothers took over the store, but they didn’t have to. And because they didn’t have to, they actually did so successfully and they now have, I don’t think they probably have 20 stores among them.
Debbie Millman:
Is it called Sagmeister?
Stefan Sagmeister:
It is called Sagmeister. So if you go to Western Austria it’s the store that’s the big deal.
Debbie Millman:
What was your relationship like with your parents as you were growing up?
Stefan Sagmeister:
I liked very much the whole situation that I was in. I was the youngest of six kids. Both of my parents worked, so I had a lot of freedom, specifically, as a very young boy. My mom didn’t know when grade school stopped. So as long as I was home for dinner, it was completely fine. She had no clue if we had school at the afternoon or not.
Debbie Millman:
So she wasn’t a helicopter parent.
Stefan Sagmeister:
She was not, which served not so well for my oldest sister who thought that she was getting too little. It served me fantastically. It was exactly… Like I felt incredibly privileged that I didn’t have to be home at any time until it was 6:30 when dinner never served. I think, in general, growing up in a small pretty town, we were middle class possibly in the town, probably even upper middle class as far as not money is concerned, but definitely as far as status is concerned, because my mom had status. If you went through town with my mom, everybody was like, “Oh, [inaudible 00:12:17] Sagmeister…” You couldn’t get anywhere, everybody knew her.
So it was a good time to… It was… Yeah, no, I definitely won the lottery by… Austria is a very, they of course, are complaining like crazy, but in general, specifically seen from the outside, now it’s a very well-functioning country with high rates of overall satisfaction. Vienna routinely is voted the most livable city in the world. I think their kind of social democratic system is actually one that I specifically, with a distance, really think works very well. There’s relatively high taxes. People are complaining like crazy, of course. But I think, ultimately, that seems to be a good system for a society to live together.
Debbie Millman:
Your parents encouraged your creativity and you went to art school.
Stefan Sagmeister:
They were completely supportive. I think because of the granddad example who kind of went in that direction but couldn’t. So when I showed some interest in there, and I had, at that point, when I graduated from high school, I had a portfolio of printed pieces. They were not very good, but they were out there. But I still didn’t get into the school that I wanted to, The University for Applied Arts, meaning I failed the entry exam and I went for a year to a small out school to basically train myself to get through the entry exam of the school that I really wanted to and then the second time around I got in.
Debbie Millman:
After university you got a job in the Hong Kong office of Leo Burnett and then came to New York City to work for the late great Tibor Kalman at M&Co. And you specifically came with that ambition working for Tibor, who in many ways was really at the top of his game at
that moment in time. What would you say was the biggest thing you learned in Tibor’s stewardship?
Stefan Sagmeister:
Well, Tibor had this fantastic knack to give you advice that you could hear, better than almost anybody I’ve ever met.
Debbie Millman:
Really?
Stefan Sagmeister:
Yeah. The way he worded it, the way there was always a put down somehow in there as well. But I’ve seen him once at the Whitney Museum where he designed the exhibit about Keith Herring and there was a long line of people standing in line to talk to him and he was holding a little court. And I stood next to him and it was unbelievable. He had something interesting and advice and clear to say to everybody. And so to answer your question, an important one… Actually, I’ll tell you two things. When I went to Hong Kong, I already knew him before, so we had sort of like a loose friendly relationship. When I went to Hong Kong, he said, “I know they’re going to pay you a shitload of money and don’t you dare spending that money because you’re going to be the whore of the ad agencies for the rest of your life if you do.” Excellent advice.
Debbie Millman:
Pithy.
Stefan Sagmeister:
Excellent advice. And I didn’t. I saved it. But almost all of my colleagues in Hong Kong are still working for ad agencies, and I’m sure many of them very unhappily. When I opened the studio after M&Co, he said, “The only thing that’s difficult in running a design studio is to figure out how not to grow. Everything else is super easy.” And I took that advice too. I definitely took it. Then of course when I partnered with Jessica, she sort of wanted to grow and we got some growth anyway. But for me, I think that’s the three to five people studio is the most pleasant. It just seems that that’s a studio size that is able to get maximum quality together with maximum joy.
Debbie Millman:
It’s interesting. I was expecting you to say something about how Tibor was able to identify the right kind of people to come work with him. So he did have a small-ish studio, but he hired Alexander Isley and Emily Oberman, and the list goes on of just extraordinary designers still working today and you in many ways have done the same. You had Hjalti Karlsson and Jan and Matteas Aaronsberger, really extraordinary people working for you, Jessica, of course, Jessica. How did you know that those people would be the right people to not only help you support your vision, but then go on and do great things on their own in the way that so many people did with Tibor?
Stefan Sagmeister:
I mean, I think that Tibor was in a specific situation as in that he really couldn’t design. He had an unbelievable vision of what good design is, but he couldn’t do it himself and that freed him, that freed a lot of time up for him. And I think that also installed a lot of confidence in the people who worked for him because they really did it. And so I don’t think there ever was a design company like M&Co in New York where are so many other design companies came out of meaning a dozen easily, I think.
Debbie Millman:
Well, you now have four, five and you’re still going.
Stefan Sagmeister:
But I think that that’s not as many as M&Co. And I think that had to do with the people being quite autonomous with the design.
Debbie Millman:
Let’s talk about this brilliant new book. There’s so many things that we can talk about. I took a peek at my watch in horror and realized, oh, my God, we’re halfway through. So fast-forward what you’re doing today. You have, undisputedly, had a career that has influenced others, inspired others, and in many ways defined a sort of benchmark in what design is capable of being able to do in our culture. You’ve created extraordinary work. You’ve won hundreds of design awards, you’ve made several films, mounted countless art exhibits, and published what I believe is now six books. I think your latest is your most conceptually and visually ambitious. It’s titled Now is Better and it is a visual exploration of human progress over the last several centuries. Why this book at this particular moment?
Stefan Sagmeister:
Well, there is a story how it started. I was at the American Academy in Rome as a design fellow or as-
Debbie Millman:
You won the Rome prize.
Stefan Sagmeister:
And it’s a great situation. You get a fantastic studio, view all over Rome, and the best thing about it really is that the food is great which means other than it’s good food, but much more importantly is it means that everybody comes for lunch and dinner. And it’s 70 people there, archeologists, filmmakers, artists, architects, designers, and so you have a salon like thing twice a day and that in combination with you working in the studio all day is just a fantastic situation. You are sitting next to somebody else all the time. And one evening I was sitting next to a lawyer, he was the husband of a invited artist, and he told me that what we are seeing right now in Poland, in Turkey, in Brazil, really means the end of modern democracy.
And I kind of thought it was interesting, didn’t really comment much, but looked it up that night. And when I Googled it, when did modern democracy start? How did it develop? It turned out that 200 years ago there was a single democratic country, the U.S., a hundred years later, right after World War I, there were 18, and now the UN officially says we have 86 Democratic countries that the UN says these are democratic countries. In 2016, we reached the absolute peak of democracy. It’s the first time in the world that more than half of all humanity lives under a democratic system so my lawyer could not have been more wrong and that seemed like a very juicy situation to pursue as a communication designer because so many of my friends feel like the lawyer.
And when I looked into it just seemed that there really are two opposing ways to look at the world. One is from the short term, which is basically how all media looks at it. The media cycle has gotten much, much shorter allowing things, by design, to be more negative to come through because to shorter the cycle, the more negative the news because negative things happened very quickly, catastrophes and scandals, and there is a completely different way to look at the world, which is long-term like what I did when I looked up democracy. Yes, it is true in the short term, at that point, Poland, Brazil turned into a non-democratic direction. But even now, five years later, both of those countries are actually turning in the other way again. So from the short term he was correct. It went a little bit less democratic, but from the long term 200, he was completely wrong. And when I looked into other directions, that seemed to be true for a lot of directions.
Debbie Millman:
So let’s talk about short-term versus long-term for a moment. It’s very easy, I think a lot of us, maybe everyone in this room is feeling the intensity of the world right now.
Stefan Sagmeister:
Sure.
Debbie Millman:
And it’s very hard, in the moment, of anything, to think long-term. Whenever we’re in something we tend to think, humans tend to think this is how it’s going to be forever. Why is it that we, despite all the positive things that you point out in this book, which are real and documented and empirical, do we all feel like civilization is doomed?
Stefan Sagmeister:
Well, I think there’s many reasons. One is the amygdala. It’s a small part in our brain like the size-
Debbie Millman:
The amygdala.
Stefan Sagmeister:
Yeah, that basically is designed as a shortcut for negativity. It comes from our pre-historic ancestors that really needed to be kept safe from the lion that would attack and it didn’t really have the same need for the banana that you didn’t see because there might be another banana around the corner. So that amygdala was designed by evolution to keep us safe. Now, we developed much faster than evolution originally thought so, and I feel that if we would look as we should look at all the short-term news, but if we would look and spend more time on the long-term, we would actually get a much fuller and better informed picture of the world.
Debbie Millman:
Despite the many terrible, horrible things happening in the world right now and for many of us in our personal lives. After reading your book, I’ve come to realize that almost any data point that’s measurable, most things are better than they were 100 years ago. I’m wondering, in an effort to sort of buoy the audience a bit on this Friday morning, can you share some of your favorite statistics and examples from the book?
Stefan Sagmeister:
Well, I’ll share some lighthearted and some more important ones.
Debbie Millman:
Perfect.
Stefan Sagmeister:
Lighthearted would be amount of guitars per million people. In the sixties, that’s the earliest that they’ve been counted, 600 per million people now 11,000. There’s just a better chance that something comes out of it and you’ll see that in other numbers there’s so many more people making their living as a musician, even though it’s very difficult to do so, than ever before.
Debbie Millman:
So Spotify hasn’t killed that?
Stefan Sagmeister:
Has not killed that. Yes. But they have to hustle, sell T-shirts and whatnot. More importantly, I would say if I can quickly get the big things out, like everybody in this room I think would agree that we would rather be alive than dead. We would rather have food than be hungry. We would rather live in a democracy than in a dictatorship. We would rather be healthy than sick. And all of these things actually can be measured and for all of these things, there are excellent numbers from the United Nations, from the UN that have measured these things over 200 years and all of these things, demonstratively, have become better. And so these are kind of just the basic things. But if I go into detail, if you lived in France 200 years ago, the average calorie count of your diet was the same as it was in Rwanda 200 years later when Rwanda was the most malnourished country in the world.
So it literally means, in Europe 200 years ago, you were very much likely part of the 90% that the UN would now say is extreme poverty. Extreme poverty. Right now, I think that means you have to live your day for under a inflation adjusted dollar a day. And so 90% of Europe lived in extreme poverty ruled over by 10% of basically the king and the court. And that was reduced now worldwide to 10%. We went from 90 to 10, it used to be 9% before the pandemic. We did go up to 10. It got a little bit worse. For full disclosure, democracy also went a little bit worse the last seven years, mostly driven by India.
That was the biggest junk that got less democratic. So it’s not a… Progress, obviously, is not a straight lineup. It’s almost like two steps forward, one step back. Also, when we make progress, we tend to have side effects that we haven’t anticipated. Those side effects have to then be taken care of or addressed before we can move forward again. But it seems that on most fronts over time, we actually moved forward, specifically, on the very, very, very important things.
Debbie Millman:
Stephen Pinker wrote the forward in your book and states, “The nature of journalism combines with our availability bias to guarantee that well-informed readers will be systematically diluted about the state of the world and the way in which it’s going. The news is a non-random sample of the worst things happening on earth at any moment. A collection of lurid anecdotes and images and narratives.” And Stefan and I were talking about the role of the news before we got on stage today, and I’m wondering if you can talk a little bit about why we have this sort of availability bias and why, for example, the nightly news always starts with the most catastrophic local event that’s occurred that day in that neighborhood or city.
Stefan Sagmeister:
It’s because we love it. It’s not because the people who make the news are particularly mean or terrible. It’s because we, and by we, I mean everybody in this audience, including myself, we just love bad news.
Debbie Millman:
Why?
Stefan Sagmeister:
It’s juicier. It’s true. Look, if I go to amazon.com and look at the comments on this book, there are 16 good ones and one bad one. I zone in on the bad one. That’s the one that I really find the juiciest, my former client and definitely acquaintance, David Byrne, has this beautiful organization called Reasons to Be Cheerful. And, of course, I follow it. I never read it. It’s just too boring. It’s like all this positive news. When we…
Debbie Millman:
I love that you’re admitting that, by the way.
Stefan Sagmeister:
Well, when we edited for two years our film, we had sent the whole crew at significant expense to Austria to interview my many brothers and sisters. And I stayed purposefully out of those interviews because I didn’t want them to be stopped of saying anything negative for us all. We wrapped it up, went back home, looked at the footage. My brothers and sisters only said positive things about me. It was completely unusable. Not a second was bound up in the film because it was unbelievably boring. Now, if they would’ve said what a fucking asshole I was as a 6-year-old, that would’ve been so juicy. It would’ve been so good for the film. And actually, to wrap this little theme up, there is very good… There’s a beautiful study that actually Pinker has in his book from Harvard that shows that the film critic who hates the film is always seen to be much more intelligent than the film critic who loves the film.
Debbie Millman:
Yesterday on Lit Hub, there was an article that they published the 12 most scathing book reviews of the year.
Stefan Sagmeister:
Juicy.
Debbie Millman:
It’s only juicy unless you know someone whose book is on that list.
Stefan Sagmeister:
Oh. Yeah.
Debbie Millman:
And then it’s rather horrific. All of the cleanup that goes into having to buoy that person back up and despite 450 other good reviews, that one review is going to be one that just haunts this person.
Stefan Sagmeister:
One hundred percent. And that unbelievable article that Tom Wolfe wrote about Leonard Bernstein, I saw an interview with Bernstein’s wife and she said this review or this article in New York Magazine was the single worst event of her life of her entire life. Everybody else got a huge kick out of it because it was very funny. It was very well written. It made Tom Wolfe famous. But yeah, there is this thing in us. I’m not proud of it. It’s surprising to me that I would still fall for it considering I’ve been working for five years on this book and I’m so aware of the mechanism. But I think it’s something, yeah, it comes from our DNA, it comes from the amygdala, it’s hard wired in us. It’s not just some psychological surface.
Debbie Millman:
Well, I think one interesting thing about at least being aware of it is perhaps we can take it less seriously.
Stefan Sagmeister:
Yes. Yeah. I will have to admit, I just, literally this week, did remove the New York Times app from my phone.
Debbie Millman:
Really?
Stefan Sagmeister:
Yes. And I’m still subscribed for it for the weekend, but there I find it is much more of an entertainment value because we read it in bed with breakfast and it’s very nice to have the printed New York Times there, but I just removed it from my phone. And I really do believe, when I think about it rationally, let’s take a subject. I followed the New York Times and let’s say Trump over the last eight years over every daily scandal and silliness that he was saying, I would be much better off having ignored all that. And now, reading two Trump books by Michael Wolfe, I would be much better informed about how that all developed with some distance and get a much better idea of how these years were than having followed it every day and having worried about it every day. Because, ultimately, even in something as important as our President, I didn’t really change anything. None of my actions really influenced that world one way or another.
Debbie Millman:
Do you think that this amygdala is also lit up by some of the witnessing of nastiness that seems to be so much a part of the daily news and our daily politics and our daily lives? It seems that people, and maybe this is a short-term view and it isn’t something that will pan out, but at this moment in time, it seems like people are just a lot ruder to each other and I think that started with Trump, but I could be wrong about that.
Stefan Sagmeister:
I mean, I think it’s a mixture. Also, I think that the rudeness also, of course comes quite a bit from social media simply because I’m sure that many people who write terrible things on social media would never tell that to that person in the face. Meaning you just said your partner got death threats.
Debbie Millman:
Yeah.
Stefan Sagmeister:
I’m a hundred percent sure that that same person who sent that death threat over social media would never say this at a dinner party in the face.
Debbie Millman:
Yeah.
Stefan Sagmeister:
And I think in that case, social media is sort of like road rage, but even more, you are even more encapsulated. You’re even further away, meaning people already behave much worse when they’re in a car because they’re in their own thing than they would to your face. And I think social media is like triple road rage. And beyond that, I don’t know if people got ruder in general, maybe they do. I mean, people on planes definitely seem to be ruder.
Debbie Millman:
And smellier.
Stefan Sagmeister:
And yeah. There I actually believe, specifically on airports I actually think that it has… But I think it has also something to do with the architecture. I, for example, feel that if you go to LaGuardia now, people are nicer than they used to be five years ago. I really think that. Check that out and see if you can see something similar.
Debbie Millman:
I think that every airport should play on repeat 24/7 Brian Eno’s Music for Airports.
Stefan Sagmeister:
You know that Haneda does that. Haneda in Tokyo, with a formerly New York designer was creative director there. They actually had Brian over and they are playing Music for Airports in the airport. I know that through my partner that in all Polish train stations, they only play Chopin, which is not bad.
Debbie Millman:
Some long-term lessons to be learned here. I want to talk to you about the artwork. The artwork in the book are compositions. They include paintings on canvases that some of which belong to your paternal great grandparents, Gerhard and Rosalia Sagmeister who open and ran that first small antique store in the 1870s. The things that your grandparents didn’t sell were stored in the attic of your childhood home, and you used some of those to make some of the work featured in the exhibits in the book on some of the fashion something that you’re wearing, for example. What made you decide to mine your family’s attic for this work?
Stefan Sagmeister:
Well, once I thought I should do a communication design project about long-term thinking, about the long-term, the next thing was what media should I do it in? The thing that went out immediately was everything digital because I can’t open my files from 15 years ago. So that was clearly didn’t seem to be a good way, both from a long term as in it doesn’t stay around for a long time, but also from a how we don’t seem to be concentrating on it for quite a long time.
Debbie Millman:
It’s so interesting. I wanted to ask you about that. The last time I looked, this book was not available on Kindle. Is it still?
Stefan Sagmeister:
It’s still not available on Kindle.
Debbie Millman:
Will it ever?
Stefan Sagmeister:
I’m not sure. We actually did one book under great effort to be downloadable also for the iPad, and these books don’t do very well because they’re so heavy as far as data is concerned, and it takes so long to download it. The system is not great so I don’t think it will, no.
Debbie Millman:
I was wondering if you weren’t offering this digitally because of the long-term and the fact that chances are 100 years from now those files will be obsolete.
Stefan Sagmeister:
Yeah, I think it’s both. So when I looked for media that would work in the long term, 200 year old paintings seemed to be perfect and we had some in the attic. I asked my brothers and sisters, “Yeah, yeah, go ahead, do whatever.” And so those were the first really, and I cut them up, meaning it was not just that we over painted all of these things. They have gigantic holes in them. New things are set in. What you probably don’t see well on the pictures is that the new things are very different in surface than the old thing. So the old thing is a canvas that’s 200 years old. The new thing are highly polished pieces of wood, many, many times polished and sanded so they’re highly glossy. They almost look like a piano.
And that just seemed conceptually neat to me that these things were actually physically around when we started to collect the data.
Then we did many other very long-term things where we did a mosaic for a bike path created by a company that already worked for the Bavarian King set into concrete very much for the long term. We did tunnels for hospitals in Toronto or we did a watch that is so… Mechanical watch that’s so crazy expensive that I know just from the expense that it’ll be repaired and cared for a long time. It just made sense to do that also for the long term. And I have to say these things, and that’s why I really think that they are pieces of design. There is a goal. So meaning like this, the paintings, the goal is that they’re exhibited then shown in media and then that somebody buys this to hang on their wall as a reminder that what they just saw on X doesn’t really mean the end of the world.
And if that, let’s say we had the first exhibition, actually here you see it, this is Thomas Aerborn in Chelsea. If we would not have sold anything, I said, “Okay, this strategy is not working, let’s do something else.” But we sold all of the paintings and I like the process, so I kept going. I also, and I think we talked about this for a second before, I also love this situation that I’m now kind of allowed to really go deep in this subject, not just from a content point of view, but that’s true, I’m now much better at getting juicy pieces of data because I have more venues, strategies available, but also from a formal point of view. It’s we are getting better at making them. I have a small team in the Brooklyn Navy Yards, four people, but I can try out different things or maybe the inserts should be transparent. We just did the first one.
Or maybe the inserts can be 3D that they are C and C’d, or maybe we can even 3D print the inserts if we can get a long-lasting material so that there is some surface to them. So it’s just, from that point, it’s somewhat a bit different from the usual graphic design office because it allows us to basically keep on one subject for quite a long time and try to make it better.
Debbie Millman:
I love that you’re using the paintings that you got from your great grandparents because I also love that you include a statistic in the book that they themselves are a statistical anomaly being among the 15% of the world’s population, at that time, 15% of the world’s population at that time, your great-grandparents were able to read and write. And today, 86% of the world’s population is literate.
Stefan Sagmeister:
And I mean that’s just a couple of generations, you know. Five of their children still died. Crazy to think about. The worst thing that could happen to parents is your kids dying. And from my great-grandparents, five of their kids died completely run-of-the-mill for their time because only 60% of all children reached adulthood. Everybody else, and this includes Maria Theresa, the German Empress with the best… This was Austrian Hungary empire that basically with the best healthcare in the world, half of her children died. It was just what happened.
Debbie Millman:
Stefan, you have a section in the book titled, “The Environment is Not Totally Fucked,” and it’s really enlightening. And I really encourage, aside from the fact that there’s also a piece of art in this book, a limited edition piece of art, the information is so profoundly provocative and enlightening. But I do have this question. How do we align the idea that things are getting better and the data that shows that things are, in the longterm, getting better with the data of climate science experts that are telling us that the earth is in almost irreversible danger.
Stefan Sagmeister:
Glad you bring that up. That’s definitely terrible and it’s, without any doubt, we didn’t have a climate problem a hundred years ago. We started our climate problem 200 years ago with the Industrial Revolution. All the CO2 that came from the industrial revolution is still up there, which also means that if you look at it from a per capita point of view, Europe is the single worst polluter out of all parts of the world because they’ve been doing it the longest but the fact that it’s a problem is new. And I still think that even in a crazy situation like this, it’s beneficial to know that we’ve accomplished quite a bit in other areas that allow us to tackle this new unbelievably giant problem then from a situation of doom and gloom. I’ve actually done this talks four weeks ago in Lviv in the Ukraine. There’s a lot of caveat.
I definitely said, “I never thought I’m going to do a talk about this book in the Ukraine because as you said in the beginning, if bombs fall on your head, you might not have the space in your brain to listen to this.” But it actually went over so incredibly well. We had an hour’s worth of discussion afterwards that we are now talking about the Ukrainian version of the book and even bringing the exhibition there, meaning I was surprised that they actually had that space, but apparently it’s possible. But I’m a really big believer, and I have, it’s not just that this is a gut feeling. I actually have evidence for that. And if you look at big social change that happened in the past decades, I think one of the biggest and most incredible is the non-smoking campaigns. Unbelievable change. Many countries, including this one, cut the amount of smokers in half, even though those people were all addicted.
And when you look at what strategies led to this, it was positive reinforcements and negative warnings. So you had all the awful pictures on your cigarette pack, but you also had the promise of better health. You also had the possibility for therapy in many countries of patches and so on so it really was both the positive and the negative that led to that change. And I really do believe that if we want to tackle the big questions of our time, and climate change is definitely in the very forefront of these questions, we do need the positive and the negative. And the news are clearly doing a fantastic job both in social media and the official news in delivering the negative and I think that I and a couple of others, like Steven Pinker, and there’s a fantastic guy at Oxford called Max Roser, who has a wonderful site called Our World in Data, and some others are trying to give little itsy bitsy bits of positive injections in there.
Debbie Millman:
I can add to the reason that the anti cigarette smoking campaigns have done so well and it also has something in common with seatbelt laws, which have also really improved mortality rates and driving, children. Children are being educated at a very early age that smoking is bad and that you have to wear a seatbelt. And so when older people get into a car and they don’t put their seat belts on, the children in the car will say, “You have to put your seatbelt on,” which gives me an enormous amount of hope when looking at the data in your book that this next generation behind us, so the generations behind us now, are so much more concerned about the environment, or so much more aware of the environment, and the need for more democracy that perhaps we’re not fucked, as you say.
The last thing I want to ask you about is the content of the work in Now is Better. And you stated that since all the content is based on long-term data, it made sense to express it through a medium that can be reasonably expected to stick around for a long time. Talk about the types of paintings that you’re using as the foundation of the work. I know that not only are you using the paintings that were found in the attic of your childhood home, you’re also acquiring paintings in auctions and places like that so tell us about that.
Stefan Sagmeister:
So I buy… I’m a very good customer now from many tiny auction houses in Austria, Switzerland, Germany, Belgium, Holland, a little bit of northern Italy. I try to stick with Central Europe because that’s where I come from. That’s where I know the things. It’s to my advantage that 18th and 19th century painting is unbelievably out of fashion so I can afford it. I try to get the best quality that I can from the painting quality or none of these pieces is truly art historically importance of this is not about destruction. I, for myself, kind of answered the question, if somebody would buy my work, including this work 200 years from now, and it stand for sale at a small auction house in Austria and somebody in the year 2,200 wants to buy it and make a new piece out of it that makes sense for that time, be my guest and more power to you.
These paintings come to my place. I take the frames off, I photograph it, I put it in my files. I then, in batches, deliver it to our studio, the Brooklyn Navy Yards. They take it off the stretcher. We have a full-time restorer as part of our group. She basically tries to, if it’s possible, sometimes these canvases are doubled and tripled up, so you can’t really work with it so we try to get rid of the double and triple canvases. And then I designed the inserts from the composition, the shapes, the colors. We cut new stretchers out of MDF from that with a computerized machine so that we can get very exact shapes. The inserts are many times lacquered and sanded and ultimately covered with resin and then are carefully inserted. And then the whole thing needs to be restored because in handling it stuff falls off and when you bend it things come off so it needs to be restored. But the restorer, she’s fantastic, and I can’t see which part have been restored and which part have not. But when you would see some of them in the process, they look quite dire.
Debbie Millman:
So is there a benchmark of where you will allow yourself to destroy a previous work? I assume that you wouldn’t do something like that to a Rembrandt.
Stefan Sagmeister:
Of course not. But basically, the chances that I’ll buy a Rembrandt for my budget at a small auction houses-
Debbie Millman:
It’s happened. But I think it would be so cool to, I mean, maybe not a Rembrandt, but I mean there’s something so wonderful about combinatorial creativity, just as an idea, that it doesn’t necessarily have to be an unknown artist that you then collaborate with, ultimately, in the work that you’re making.
Stefan Sagmeister:
Well, there’s a history of that sort of idea. At one time, Rauschenberg bought a de Kooning drawing and erased it. There is a fantastic piece by Kippenberger who bought a Gerhard Richter painting and made a coffee table out of it and called it Interconte style, nastily.
Debbie Millman:
I bet people loved it.
Stefan Sagmeister:
So I’m not sure if I need to contribute to that genre. It’s been meaning specifically the Kippenberger Richter thing I think is fantastic and I don’t think I could top this, but I do have a dream of doing very, very large paintings which come to auction very rarely because these very large paintings were very expensive to have been done. Like if you had a portrait to be done, a face portrait was one price, a bust was another. A full portrait, which you’ll see very few full portraits was very expensive you paid extra for another hand. If one hand was hidden, it was a cheaper portrait than a double hand.
Debbie Millman:
Hands are difficult to draw.
Stefan Sagmeister:
Exactly. They’re pain in the ass and had to be drawn often by the master of the studio as opposed to an assistant who could do the dress or the trousers. And so they come to these kind of auctions that I’m dealing with less so, but I would love to do a big historical painting or so but most of them have been commissioned by institutions. And of course, the reason these smaller auction houses have so much work is because they come from private houses and the grandchildren don’t want what was in the attic and give it to an auction house.
Debbie Millman:
Well, maybe they will now.
Stefan Sagmeister:
Who knows? Yes.
Debbie Millman:
I love what you said about the year 2200. 2200, so yeah, 2200. Yeah. I’m not good at math. Data visualization is not my specialty. I like to look at it, but I don’t understand any of it. So it’s a hundred years from now. I’d like to think that another interviewer will be interviewing a designer and an artist about how their work was inspired by an Austrian designer working in the 20th and 21st century, who tried to persuade society that we weren’t totally doomed in 2023.
Stefan Sagmeister:
Well, let’s hope for that.
Debbie Millman:
Yes. Stefan Sagmeister.
Stefan Sagmeister:
Thank you.
Debbie Millman:
Thank you, thank you for writing. Now is Better, and thank you for being this very special guest on this very special episode of Design Matters at Creative Mornings. Tina Roth-Eisenberg. Thank you.